Your Child’s Interests: Why Most Kids Can’t Name One by Fifteen, and How to Find Them Before Then

“What are you interested in?” is the question I asked two thousand teenagers, one way or another, over eleven years, and the most common answer was a shrug.

Not a sullen shrug. A real one. They didn’t know. Ask what they wanted to be and you’d get TikToker, YouTuber, or “I don’t know, something with money.” Ask what they did on a Saturday and you’d get a phone. Ask what they were good at and they’d look at their friend to check. Every one of them had been a four-year-old who was interested in something so hard it was all she could talk about. Somewhere between four and fifteen the interest went quiet, and I spent a decade watching the machinery that quieted it, and then I went home and started building the opposite.

What are your child’s interests? (The form, and the real question)

If you’re here because a school questionnaire or a camp form asked you to list your child’s interests, the fast version is this: an interest is anything your child returns to on her own, without being asked and without being paid in stickers. Not what she’s good at, not what she’s enrolled in, not what you’d like her to be into. What she goes back to. For a young child that’s often a topic (trucks, horses, volcanoes, a particular animal), a material (water, mud, drawing, taking things apart), or a kind of activity (building, sorting, making up stories, climbing). Write down the three things she does when nobody has told her what to do. That’s the list.

The real question underneath the form is harder, and it’s the one this essay is for: why do so many kids arrive at adolescence unable to answer it, and what can you do at seven so yours doesn’t?

How an interest actually develops

The best model I know comes from two educational psychologists, Suzanne Hidi and Ann Renninger, who in 2006 laid out how interest grows in four phases. First, something catches a child’s attention, triggered by novelty, a person, a surprise: a triggered situational interest. Second, if the situation keeps supporting it, the interest is maintained; she keeps coming back while the thing is in front of her. Third, and this is the hinge, the interest becomes hers: she starts seeking it out when it isn’t in front of her, asking questions nobody assigned, an emerging individual interest. Fourth, it’s well-developed: she knows a lot, wants to know more, and will push through boredom and difficulty for it.

Phases one and two need an environment that offers things and lets her linger. Phases three and four need time that belongs to her, because an interest can’t become individual if every hour is someone else’s. And that’s exactly where the machinery goes to work.

Where the interests go

A school day is built out of triggered situational interest. A new unit, a new book, a video, a hook at the top of the lesson; teachers are trained to trigger, and we’re good at it. Then the bell rings. The child who was, for forty minutes, interested in volcanoes is moved to fractions, and the next day to a different book, and the interest never gets the sustained contact it needs to move to phase two, let alone the unstructured time it needs for phase three. Add homework and activities that eat the afternoon, and a screen that fills whatever gap is left with an endless supply of phase-one triggers, and you get a fifteen-year-old who has been mildly interested in ten thousand things for ten minutes each and has never once had the chance to get interested in one thing for a year.

I watched it happen from inside the machine, and I was part of it. I also watched the exception, and the exception is why I’m sure about the mechanism. I was a rebel about the curriculum. I ran Socratic discussions instead of worksheets, let kids build projects around what they cared about, and tied the books to their own lives and their own obsessions wherever I could get away with it, and some kids lit up. Not all of them. But a kid who had been a shrug for two months would find out that the novel connected to the thing he actually cared about (a sport, a game, a fight with his dad, a question about whether people are basically good) and he would talk, and then read, and then write, and the interest he’d had all along would come out from wherever school had made him put it. The interest wasn’t gone. It was buried, under a schedule that never once asked for it.

That’s the systems layer, and the blame lands there. A child who can’t name an interest at fifteen is not a child without interests. She’s a child whose interests were never given the hours.

How to find out what your child is actually interested in

Watch what she does with nothing to do. This is the whole method, and it only works if there is some nothing. A kid whose afternoons are scheduled and whose gaps are screened will show you no interests, because there’s no room for one to show. Clear an hour, remove the device, and watch what she reaches for after the boredom passes. (I’ve written about the boredom part here.) Do that for two weeks and you’ll have your list.

Notice what she asks about. Questions are phase three showing itself. A child who asks about the same thing three days running is telling you something, and the response that grows the interest is more of the thing: a book, a trip, a person who knows about it, a material to work with. The response that kills it is a worksheet about it.

Follow it past where it’s convenient. An interest in bugs means bugs in the house. An interest in cooking means a wrecked kitchen. An interest in a video game means, at minimum, that you have to find out what about the game she loves, and there is almost always a real interest inside it (building, strategy, story, competition) that can be fed without the screen.

Don’t grade it. The fastest way to move an interest out of phase four and back to phase one is to attach a reward or a test to it. A kid who’s reading everything about sharks does not need a sharks reading log. She needs more shark books and to be left alone with them.

And keep your own preferences out of it. Her interest will not be the one you’d have picked. Mine weren’t for my parents and yours weren’t for yours, and a child who senses that her interest disappoints you will trade it for one that doesn’t, and then she’s fifteen and shrugging.

If you homeschool, this is the thing you can do that no school can: build the week around what she’s actually into and let it run for months. The Planner is built for exactly that kind of week.

One thing

For the next week, write down every question your kid asks you that has nothing to do with school or logistics. At the end of the week, read the list. The interest is in there.

If your kid used to be obsessed with something and now can’t tell you what she likes, and you’re starting to wonder what happened between then and now, Breaking Default is the thing I built for that question. I also write every week; you can find me on Instagram or join the list.

Sources

• Hidi S, Renninger KA, “The Four-Phase Model of Interest Development,” Educational Psychologist 41(2), 2006, pp. 111–127. Triggered situational interest → maintained situational interest → emerging individual interest → well-developed individual interest. Link